Abstract

Listeners are able to distinguish native from non-native speech with as little as 30 ms of input (Flege, 1984; Kondaurova & Francis, 2008), suggesting that listeners’ mental representations include fine-grained acoustic detail about typical and atypical pronunciations in their native language. The current study considers the relative contribution of different language-specific sounds to listeners’ language categorization. English monolinguals and early and late Spanish-English bilinguals categorized nonce words containing a language-specific target segment as belonging to English or Spanish. Target segments included the English phonemes /θ, ɹ/, the Spanish phoneme /r/, and the Spanish and English versions of /l, u/, which exist in both languages but vary in their phonetic implementation. All listeners accurately categorized stimuli with /ɹ, r/ and the Spanish pronunciations of /l, u/. English /θ/ and /l, u/ variants received more mixed responses. For these more difficult sounds, late bilinguals were more accurate than the other groups. Early bilinguals responded faster than the other groups to stimuli with language-specific phonemes, and both bilingual groups responded more quickly than monolinguals to /l, u/. The results reveal that the bilinguals’ experience with both languages enhances their sensitivity to language-specific cues and may lead to more detailed sound representations for their languages.